Palin: Governors will initiate economic recovery process

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared on Fox Business with Eric Bolling on Monday and weighed in on the economic recovery process, criticizing the federal government for “screwing it up.”

“Governors are going to tackle this problem and not wait for the feds to try and fix anything,” she said. “Part of the reaction you are seeing with the governors having to cut the budget has to do with the fed screwing things up.”

When asked what governors need to do to get the economy back on the right track Palin replied, “Governors are having to re-manage the public expectation. They have to, not only freeze spending at historically high levels, but actually cut and be very realistic with constituents and say this [the stimulus] was never free money to start with. A lot of us conservative governors vetoed those funds. We were overridden by even republican-led legislatures to accept the funds anyway and now look where we are two years down the road.”

Palin stressed that public pension reform is absolutely needed and cited her father, a retired teacher, as a personal example.

“A pension is a promise. You can’t take that away from people who have already paid into the system but you gotta stop the bleeding right now and change the system for the new,” Palin said.

Bolling replayed Fox’s Bill O’Reilly’s interview Sunday with Barack Obama in which Obama states that he hasn’t moved toward the center in order to raise his approval ratings as he launched his re-election bid and that he’s still the same guy.

Palin cited it as a lost opportunity.

“It is a little strange he doesn’t understand the need to move from the far left, economically speaking, to the center, where the American public expects him to be in order to get the economy moving again,” Palin said. “He could pretend he’s moving to the center, but has no desire to. He just said that to Bill O’Reilly. It’s not good for anybody in our country to hear our President obstinately denying the need to move to the center away from his far left policies that are going to lead to some European-style socialist agenda that is going to destroy the economy. It’s a shame; it’s a lost opportunity. He needs to go to the center and do what works and that is get back to free market, economic principles.”

Lori Calabrese is the National Sarah Palin Examiner for Examiner.com. Lori is an independent writing and editing professional with an extensive interest in government and politics, primarily the role of women politicians.